Lectures on the Will to Know Quotes

“In fact the system of collective contribution, levy of a tenth, and redistribution to the participants, is the schema of the sacrificial rite (one provides the victim; the god, the temple, the priests levy a tenth, then redistribution takes place: redistribution that imparts a new strength and power to those who benefit from it, deriving from the sacrifice itself).

The game — sacrifice, division, levy, redistribution — is a religious form of individual and group invigoration which has been transposed into a social practice involving the resolution of a class conflict.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“But popular power is not merely ignorant. It is inevitably impure since it is anomos. Popular power harkens only to its interests and desires. It is violent: it imposes its will on everyone. It is murderous. And in a privileged fashion, it kills the sage, as the one who occupies the place where the laws speak.

Popular power is criminal in essence — criminal in relation to what, since it expresses the will of all? It is criminal in relation to nomos, to the law as foundation of the city's existence. Popular power is crime against the very nature of the city.

The sage as pure keeper of knowledge and nomos therefore has to protect the city against itself and prohibit it from governing itself.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“We should not forget that before being inscribed in Western consciousness as the principle of quantification, harmony, and classical non-existence, Greek measurement was an immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions.

We can see how introducing measure is linked to a whole problem of peasant indebtedness, the transfer of agricultural properties, the settlement of debts, equivalence between foodstuff or manufactured objects, urbanization, and the establishment of a State form.

The institution of money appears at the heart of this practice of measurement.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“The apparent effect of truth which operates in the sophism is in reality a quasi-juridical bond between a discursive event and a speaking subject. Hence the fact that we find two theses in the Sophists: Everything is true (as soon as you say something, that thing exists.). Nothing is true (whatever words you employ, they never express what exists).”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“The difference between the Sophist and the ignorant (or stupid) is not the difference between an intentional error (into which one falls in order to trip up one's adversary) and an unintentional error (of which both interlocutors are victims). The Sophist should not be interpreted as someone who uses error as a trap and uses faulty reasoning as a crafty weapon. He occupies a different dimension from that of true or faulty reasoning; he is on the side of the semblance of reasoning. He occupies the dimension of shadow and reflection; he occupies a reasoning mirage, but he does not really reason. And this invalidation, produced not by error but by semblance, affects not only the Sophist's reasoning moreover, it affects all his wisdom, his sophia.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“In saying that the truth is both said and not said by the philosopher (said and not said in the form of stammering), Aristotle was still close to the methods of interpretation used by grammarians in their commentaries on the poets. Symbolic or allegorical methods pointing out what was deliberately hidden by Homer behind the figure of Nestor or Ulysses.

But there is a difference however — and a crucial one — which is that for Aristotle the equivocation of the said and the not-said, this distance without gap which means that the truth is both hidden and present in the philosopher's words, this light that is shadow, is not the effect of an oracular kind of intentional secret or prudent reserve. If philosophers do not speak the truth, this is not because their indulgence wishes to protect men from its terrible face; it is because they lack a certain knowledge (savoir).”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance the system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“The establishment of a precise calendar was necessary for tax collection, the development of irrigation works, fixing the times of sowing and harvest, and so for determining when a war could be waged. (At the center of this, the problem of intercalation: the lunar calendar determined the months, but, since the twelve lunar months did not completely fill the solar year, there was a constant gap which was made up for gradually, and then in one go, with the intercalation of a thirteenth month.)

At the level of an extended empire, these calculations and the decisions which followed from them could only be centralized. Cosmo- or theogonic knowledge was also linked to political power. [...] Linked to political power and the State apparatus in these two ways, knowledge is quite naturally located in the hands of functionaries: knowledge is a State service and political instrument. Hence its necessary secret character. It does not have to circulate or be widespread. It is linked directly to the possession of power.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“In comparison with the justice exercised with sovereign power by traditional chiefs, the kings of justice, by the powerful of crooked judgments, Hesiodic justice, going from the decree of Zeus to the order of the world, and from this to peasant vigilance and exactness, to the interplay of good understanding and debts repaid, calls for a whole transfer of sovereignty. Calls for it, but does not record it, for at the time of Works and Days justice is institutionalized only in the hands of the kings of justice.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“Whatever the philosopher says, in his philosophical discourse at any rate, he will be in the truth, even if he is himself a man of little virtue or a bad citizen; something of the truth will pass into his discourse, and, on the other hand, his discourse will never completely die out, it will never be completely erased in the history of the truth; in one way or another it will forever recur in it. The philosopher is someone who is never completely driven out or who is never completely killed. There is no philosophical ostracism. The victories discourse may win against him, the jousts in the course of which he may be vanquished, do not affect that part of truth which is delivered in his discourse.”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge

“[I]f we desire to learn for bad reasons (so as to get the upper hand over others, or to win unjust cases), then we will have to change in order to learn, or the fact of learning will change the one who learns. In short, the subject of knowledge will not be the same as the subject of desire. Euthydemus: to teach is to kill — and behind all this emerges the big question that philosophy has not ceased to conceal precisely inasmuch as its birth may not be entirely foreign to it: can knowledge be sold? Can it, on the one hand, be closed up on itself like the precious object of greed and possession? And, on the other hand, can it enter into the game and circulation of wealth and goods?”
― Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge